urban drift productions Ltd.
Pressespiegel 2006
Medium: DAM No8 (1/5)
Datum: 10/2006
Auflage: 10.000
ARCHITECTUREART
Back to Mine
TALKING CITIES EXHIBITION IN ESSEN, GERMANY
In Talking Cities the micropolitics of contemporary urban space is investigated through a series
of dialogues. Using a transdisciplinary approach that brings together architecture and urban
design strategies, as well as artistic responses, this is an event with more grit than gloss.
Text by Anneke Bokern, all photos by Allard van der Hoek except where mentioned otherwise
urban drift productions Ltd.
Pressespiegel 2006
Medium: DAM No8 (2/5)
Datum:
10/2006
Auflage: 10.000
ARCHITECTUREART
This page, top left:
Entrance to Entry 2006:
new escalator by OMA
Top right:
Before Taiwan’s Interbreeding Field
started building its installation, its
members built a workshop using
the collective’s own lamps and
tables in the exhibition space
Opposite page, top:
‘Reinforcing each other’s qualities’:
Interbreeding Fields organic
Gordian architecture gives the
visitor the unique possibility to get
an intense physical experience of
the coal washery’s chutes, which
dominate the exhibition space at
level 17
Opposite page, below:
Karsten Konrad’s ficitional scale
model Stadtplaners Workshop
shows the Prager Straße in Dresden
Photograph by Günter Lintl
’They work at night, when nobody else is here. That’s why they’ve even brought their own lamps, made
from plastic canisters. Every morning, it’s a surprise to see what they’ve come up with overnight. ’ During
the installation of the exhibition Talking Cities, the members of Taiwanese artist collective Interbreeding
Field clearly were the curators’ darlings. ’Their contribution, a wooden bridge structure, is growing
rampantly,’ Julia Albani of urban drift says, smiling. ’We’ve even had to tell them to dismantle parts of
it again, because they went beyond their assigned space. ’And it doesn’t stop there. One night, the
Taiwanese brownies simply produced thirty cute little benches from leftover wood - leaving the curators
to wonder what to do with them. Two weeks before the opening, they’re still stacked in a corner of the
exhibition space.
In a way, Interbreeding Field is the epitome of what Talking Cities is all about: enthusiasts who take possession of a space and transform it with minimal means, but a lot of diligence. The exhibition, organised by Berlin-based platform for architecture and urbanism urban drift, takes place in the coal washing
plant at Zeche Zollverein, a huge industrial heritage site in Germany’s coal mining district, and is part of
design manifestation Entry 2006. It brings together 35 international artist and design teams who deliver
statements on marginal and residual areas within contemporary urban fabrics. Zeche Zollverein itself, of
course, is one of these wastelands, so exhibition and venue form a perfect partnership, reinforcing each
other’s qualities.
BACKSIDES AND FRINGES
Talking Cities was initiated by Francesca Ferguson, founder and artistic director of urban drift and director
designate of the Swiss architecture museum in Basel. One and a half years ago, she succesfully proposed
the exhibition concept to the organisers of Entry 2006. Instead of presenting another glossy design show,
the forceful British curator wants to direct attention to the backsides and fringes of our cities - forgotten
non-places, just like Zeche Zollverein was before it was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2001.
’First of all, we launched a call for contributions, she recounts. ’Some teams applied with an idea, others
with a realised project. But I also invited a part of the participants directly. What really mattered to me was
to create a mix of generations. I didn’t want the exhibition to become an exclusive platform for the young
and hip. ’ Accordingly, established grandmasters like Belgian architect Luc Deleu find themselves next to
young, far less-known practices and even a student team.
The location of the exhibition couldn’t be more appropriate. While most of the Zollverein-buildings, desgined by Fritz Schupp and Martin Kremmer at the end of the 1920s, look as neat as a pin again, thanks
to UNESCO money, the coal washing plant is still a building site. It is currently undergoing a renovation
and transformation designed by OMA, who also created the masterplan for the entire colliery. Half-way
urban drift productions Ltd.
Pressespiegel 2006
Medium: DAM No8 (3/5)
Datum:
10/2006
Auflage: 10.000
urban drift productions Ltd.
Pressespiegel 2006
Medium: DAM No8 (4/5)
Datum: 10/2006
Auflage: 10.000
ARCHITECTUREART
From left to right:
Baukasten.berlin presents its
products – ranging from happy
families to pillow slips that show
demolished facades of modern
buildings – inside a kiosk that
was once widespread in countries
of Eastern Europe, but is now
disappearing: the ‘K67’
Luc Deleu’s utopian, 20m-long
model of the ‘Unadapted City’
Rome-based architects IaN+ has
analysed the areas along the huge
ring-road GRA and claim that empty
areas should be preserved to form
a future city
Berlin designer Andreas Bergmann
transformed a building fence, one
of the most common objects in
contemporary cities, into a place
to dwell
The softly pulsating sculptures of
the Audio Lounge, built by students
of the KHM Köln. In the background:
Interbreeding Field’s ‘Open Reality’
El ultimo grito, Spanish designers
based in London, turned their space
in ‘Talking Cities’ into something
totally alien: with 20,000 green
stickers they created ‘tagged
environment #8’
All photographs on this spread
by Günter Lintl
through the building activities, the five exhibitions constituting Entry 2006 have taken over the still very
rough plant, which is supposed to house a regional historical museum from 2008. As it stands there are
not many visible changes - apart from a new concrete layer on the façade and a beautiful, bright orange
escalator, docked to the plant at a slanting angle, mimicking the old conveyor belts connecting the colliery buildings.
ANYTHING BUT RANDOM
Talking Cities takes place on level 17 - which, by the way, doesn’t denote the 17th floor, but a floor at a
height of 17 metres. ’We chose this space ourselves,’ Ferguson explains, ’most of the other floors are
subdivided by cubicles and partitions. This one was the most industrial-looking, extending around a core
of big, free-standing chutes.’ Ferguson certainly knows what she wants and how to get it. Asked whether the participants themselves could determine in which corner of the space their project would be presented, she reacts slightly irritated: ’No, of course not. I created a concept for the exhibition. It’s based
on a system of juxtapositions and it’s anything but random. ’
In the centre of the exhibition, between the chutes, Ferguson placed the so-called Audio Lounge: a
group of sculptural seating objects which also serve as broadcasting devices for the exhibition’s own radio station. Designed by a group of students of the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, the white benches are illuminated from the inside, and bands of copper wire run across their surfaces. By holding a little
cable spool with an integrated loudspeaker to one of the bands, visitors can listen to one of four radio
channels, broadcasting discussions between the participants of the exhibition.
Around this core the projects are arranged, connected by exhibition architecture designed by German
Thilo Fuchs. His rather simple and rough wooden frame structure, painted the same red lead colour as
the steel window frames and girders in the Zollverein buildings, permeates the space, wrapping itself
around the existing columns. ‘The building is listed as a monument,’ Albani says, ‘we weren’t allowed
to touch its construction, not even to bang a nail into the wall. So the whole exhibition architecture had
to be built around the columns.’ And Ferguson adds: ‘It’s actually an informal grid, wrapped around and
plugged into the existing space.’ In a second layer of wrapping, white graphic strips with quotes by the
participants span between the wooden posts, looking a bit like the never-ending paper snakes that telexes used to disgorge.
ANTI-GLOSSY APPROACH
Although the installation looks rather makeshift, even a bit ramshackle at first sight, it fits in very well
with Ferguson’s anti-glossy approach. ’I’m not interested in high-end design. It’s not relevant in a context like this,’ she says confidently. Context, just like dialogue, is one of her magic words. Accordingly,
urban drift productions Ltd.
Pressespiegel 2006
Medium: DAM No8 (5/5)
Datum: 10/2006
Ferguson has brought together 35 projects and artworks that deal with non-places in a very contextual way.
Large-scale photos of international cityscapes provide a virtual urban backdrop, while Zeche Zollverein and
the Ruhr valley conurbation form the real-life setting and anchor of the exhibition.
The projects presented range from Simon Conder’s ‘Black Rubber House’ (a weird little building standing in
the shabby landscape of Dungeness beach in England) via Austrian photographer Aglaia Konrad’s pictures
of new towns around Cairo, to German artist Karsten Konrad’s scale models of GDR-buildings, made from
materials that he finds on the sites, and Atelier Bow Wow’s ‘pet architecture’ in Tokyo. Folke Köbberling and
Martin Kaltwasser have erected one of their favela-style shanty huts, and Toh Shimazaki has constructed
a spatial sculpture dedicated to imperfection. Do-it-yourself, temporality, low budget, smallness and niche
are the keywords. Very often, it’s about distilling something beautiful from the ugly or implanting something
beautiful into the ugly - even if Ferguson claims that aesthetics don’t matter.
CONCEPTUAL BAZAAR
As curator Ferguson prefers to emphasise the effect instead of the form of the projects: they all aim to trigger discussions or developments with minimal means. ’Dialogue might be the only excuse for architecture’,
one of the quotes on the graphic strips reads. It’s by Cedric Price, whose visionary design concepts for deteriorating industrial sites from the 1960s were just as much a source of inspiration for Ferguson’s exhibition
as Rem Koolhaas’s master plan for Zeche Zollverein. With their projects, the participants of the exhibition
want to incite dialogues about the use of space, while at the same time, they’re brought into dialogue with
each other in the exhibition. Of course this results in cacophony, but that’s the intention. Ferguson calls her
show a ‘conceptual bazaar’, in which the exhibits aren’t sanctified, but presented in ‘intense juxtapositions’.
If there were anything to criticise about all this, it would be that it’s not very controversial. Who doesn’t like
charming little interventions in big and morbid residual spaces? Aren’t we all inflicted by periphery-romanticism? But while this constitutes part of the fascination of the single projects, the actual potential for controversy lies on a different scale. It’s in the underlying idea that these small, cheap interventions might be more
useful than big urbanistic strategies. Applied to Zeche Zollverein this means: installing a tiny swimming pool
in the coking plant could be a better idea than to impose megalomaniac plans for Ruhrtropolis on the area.
That’s what Ferguson calls the ‘micropolitics of urban space’. And that’s where the controversy, and consequently the dialogue starts. #
www.talkingcities.net, until 3 December 2006
www.entry-2006.com
Auflage: 10.000